Papers I find interesting---mostly, but not solely, in Process Algebra---, and some fun stuff in Mathematics and Computer Science at large and on general issues related to research, teaching and academic life.

Thursday, December 31, 2015

The EC'16 conference will be held in lovely Maastricht, NL next year with Vincent Conitzer as general chair. As far as I can tell, this is the second time that EC comes to Europe in its 17-year history. This is a step that, as president of the EATCS, I warmly welcome.

Submit your best work to EC'16 and you'll have a chance to visit a historical city at the heart of Europe to boot!

I strongly encourage members of the TCS community to nominate eligible
colleagues for these accolades. Writing a good letter of nominations
takes a little work, but this is time well spent as it puts some of the
many outstanding members of our community and their research areas in
the spotlight, and provides role models for the younger members of the
TCS community.

It's been a long journey, but the Alonzo Church Award is finally off the ground. Here is the call for nominations I just received from the first award committee. You will notice that the deadline for nominating papers for the first award is close: March 1, 2016. (Of course, the call for nominations will be issued earlier next year.) For the time being, I hope that you will follow Littlewood's zero-infinity law: If you have a paper (or papers) you'd like to nominate for the award, do it now, where in this case "now" means "by the end of February 2016" :-)

The award committee, whose members I thank on behalf of the EATCS, look forward to receiving your nominations!

The 2016 Alonzo Church Award

for

Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation

Call for Nominations

Introduction

An annual award, called the Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding
Contributions to Logic and Computation, was established in 2015
by the ACM Special Interest Group for Logic and Computation (SIGLOG),
the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS),
the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL), and the
Kurt Gödel Society (KGS). The award is for an outstanding
contribution represented by a paper or by a small group of papers
published within the past 25 years. This time span allows the lasting
impact and depth of the contribution to have been established. The
award can be given to an individual, or to a group of individuals who
have collaborated on the research. For the rules governing this
award, see

The contribution must have appeared in a paper or papers published
within the past 25 years. Thus, for the 2016 award, the cut-off date
is January 1, 1991. When a paper has appeared in a conference and
then in a journal, the date of the journal publication will determine
the cut-off date. In addition, the contribution must not yet have
received recognition via a major award, such as the Turing Award, the
Kanellakis Award, or the Gödel Prize. (The nominee(s) may have
received such awards for other contributions.) While the contribution
can consist of conference or journal papers, journal papers will be
given a preference.

Nominations for the 2016 award are now being solicited. The
nominating letter must summarize the contribution and make the case
that it is fundamental and outstanding. The nominating letter can
have multiple co-signers. Self-nominations are excluded. Nominations
must include: a proposed citation (up to 25 words); a succinct
(100-250 words) description of the contribution; and a detailed
statement (not exceeding four pages) to justify the nomination.
Nominations may also be accompanied by supporting letters and other
evidence of worthiness.

The 2016 award will be presented at LICS, the flagship conference of
SIGLOG. The award will be accompanied by an invited lecture by the
award winner, or by one of the award winners. The awardee(s) will
receive a certificate and a cash prize of USD 2,000. If there are
multiple awardees, this amount will be shared.

Monday, December 21, 2015

"New journals spring up with overwhelming, almost tiresome, frequency these days. But Discrete Analysis is
different. This journal is online only — but it will contain no papers.
Rather, it will provide links to mathematics papers hosted on the
preprint server arXiv. Researchers will submit their papers directly
from arXiv to the journal, which will evaluate them by conventional peer
review."

and ends as follows:

"The question, perhaps, is how readily researchers will embrace the
model. “Apart from being an arXiv overlay journal, our journal is very
conventional, which I think is important so that mathematicians won't
feel it is too risky to publish in it,” says Gowers. “But if the model
becomes widespread, then I personally would very much like to see
more-radical ideas tried out as well” — for example, post-publication
review and non-anonymous referees."

Based on the first paragraph of this blog post by Timothy Gowers, it is highly likely that Discrete
Analysis will start by publishing some very strong papers. This will probably play an important role in enticing mathematicians to publish some of their best work in it and in giving the new journal a good impact factor within a reasonable amount of time.

Just like Discrete Analysis will do, Logical Methods in Computer Science (and EPTCS for workshops and conferences) only publishes papers that have undergone classic peer review and have been vetted for publication by the cognizant editor. For what it is worth, I therefore fail to see why Logical Methods in Computer Science and Discrete Analysis, once it starts publishing papers, are not doing journal publishing, as hinted in this excerpt from a post from the scholarly kitchen:

"My view is that while this is a fascinating way to draw out from arXiv
links to good preprints in relevant fields, this is not journal
publishing. In Gower’s blog he moves on from talking about the idea of
the overlay journal to a more polemical discussion of how his venture is
in essence the future of the journal, reducing costs and supplying
quality content in a way that may be used in the same way journal
articles are used now. While Gowers has every right to his views on
this, I would argue that, while his is certainly an exciting way to make
use of preprints in arXiv, what it
does is quite distinct from a journal. As discussed above, the journal
is a matter of record, and like it or not, journals form a part of the
academic and recognition workflow that allows for career progress, grant
making, more research and more articles to be published."

Logical Methods in Computer Science is "a matter of record", and publishing in it does carry weight in hiring and promotion decisions. Prime conferences in the field, such as LICS, have used it for their special issues.

Whether a journal publishes its contents as overlay of the arXiv or by some other means, IMHO it is the process that went into selecting the papers and the scientific quality of what is published that matter.

I strongly encourage members of the TCS community to nominate eligible colleagues for these accolades. Writing a good letter of nominations takes a little work, but this is time well spent as it puts some of the many outstanding members of our community and their research areas in the spotlight, and provides role models for the younger members of the TCS community.

Tuesday, December 01, 2015

Last Saturday, the cultural pages of a major Italian newspaper featured an article with the title "Arte digitale - la creatività salvata da social e logaritmi" ("Digital art - creativity saved by social networks and logarithms", sic) . The article ends with the following war cry: un "logaritmo vi seppellirà" oppure un "logaritmo vi salverà! " (a logarithm will bury you or a logarithm will save you!).